Climate Atlas Queensland 2025, 2050 and 2070 – CAIRNS – Comfort/Energy Simulations – Cairns, CBD

Report – Climate Atlas Comfort/Energy Simulations Part 2 – Cairns case study 30.10.2025 RA: Dr. Ioana Corina Giurgiu (IG) PI: Prof. Dr. Daniela Ottmann, Prof. Dr. Elizabeth Musgrave Part 2 of this report summarizes climate, outdoor comfort and energy modelling methods/outcomes for the Climate Atlas Cairns case study site. In contrast with the Burleigh case study, the approach here focused on exploring the opportunities for climate-responsive urban optimisation. A typical urban block geometry was identified, then converted into a parametric Grasshopper definition which was used in a multi-objective optimisation experiment. The optimisation process used the evolutionary genetic algorithm (GA) NSGA-II via the Grasshopper Wallacei V2.5 plugin (Makki et al. 2019). Two optimisation solutions were selected and analysed alongside the original block using the method described in Part 1 of this report. To enable comparison, CSIRO rcp8.5 predicted 2050 climate data was used in all simulations. The following sections describe the approach used to define the typical urban block (Sect.1), the set-up of the resulting parametric model and key GA parameters (Sect.2), optimization results and solution selection criteria (Sect.3), a summary comparison of the final analysis results (Sect.4) and key conclusions regarding the applicability and limitations of this method (Sect.5).